Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews

by John Grant

  But then one day a robbery goes not just wrong but spectacularly, inexplicably wrong. It soon becomes evident to Driver that it was always intended to be that way, that the robbers were set up as patsies for the furtherance of an agenda at whose purposes he can only hazily guess. The sole survivor of the "tidying up" operation and hunted by the shady masterminds of this crime, he decides his only possible means of self-preservation is to take the fight to the foe, which he does with lethal effect ... discovering to his slow surprise as he does so that in fact he's superbly good at two things, not merely one.

  As you'd expect from Sallis, the writing, read from one page to the next, is gorgeous. Where the novella disappoints is, as noted, in the structure. Noir fiction is often very clever indeed, but tales in this genre lose their effectiveness if they wear their cleverness on their sleeve. Drive does, and very ostentatiously does. That is its failing. At the same time, I can see how it would make a wonderful movie,* because the plot

  [* 2011 note: And, sure enough, into a movie it was duly made: Drive (2011), directed by Nicholas Winding Refn and starring Ryan Gosling as Driver.]

  itself, sans the pretentiousness, is a great, near-archetypal tale.

  —Crescent Blues

  Quietus

  by Vivian Schilling

  Hannover House, 600 pages, hardback, 2002

  You've all read or watched the story about the small group of people who, through some trivial quirk of circumstance, fail to get killed in an air crash but are thereafter pursued by the Angel of Death who wants to put Heaven's accounting straight by bumping them all off.

  Well, that's what this long novel is about – and if it were practically any other novel on the theme I almost certainly wouldn't bother reviewing it. However, with any standard theme in fiction there comes along, every now and then, a novel which seems to be the definitive treatment; and Quietus, I maintain, is it for this particular plot.

  It's a very long book (small print on nearly 600 big pages) but it's utterly absorbing, and never for a moment does its plot display any signs of tiredness. Schilling has done her homework on the subject of the Angel of Death, and it shows. Moreover, her central characters aren't just the usual stereotypes – not a scantily clad co-ed among them. These are real people, with genuine rather than stereotyped problems concerning booze, their marriages, their feelings towards others, their perceptions of their inadequacies, and so on. This extends even to the particular Angel of Death who's been charged with disposing of the main protagonist, Kylie O'Rourke, and with whom she establishes a loving and intimate relationship; it feels odd to find myself typing this, but Schilling's Angel of Death is not the standard two-dimensional nemesis.

  I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and would have done so even more had it not been for the intrusion of countless small editorial and proofreading errors – "sanctity" for "sanctuary", "peak" for "peek", "may" for "might", "eminent" for "imminent" ... One can only hope that Schilling has had stern words with her publisher so that these blemishes will be eliminated from the paperback edition.

  —Crescent Blues

  Louisiana Breakdown

  by Lucius Shepard

  illustrated by J.K. Potter, foreword by Poppy Z. Brite, afterword by J.K. Potter

  Golden Gryphon, 145 pages, hardback, 2003

  Somewhere in Louisiana, USA – or, to be more accurate, in the country called American Gothic – is the small town of Grail, filled with drunks, the jobless, bigots and centuries-old tradition. More centuries than there have been white human beings here, it seems, for the town's central tradition is that of the May Queen. Every twenty years, as part of a deal done with The Good Gray Man, the folk of Grail must appoint a ten-year-old girl as the new May Queen; she will, it is believed, draw all the town's bad luck to her during her period of tenure.

  The current May Queen is Vida Dumars, and her reign will end tomorrow when the Good Gray Man comes to claim her as his bride. She has no thought of bucking her fate until drifting into town comes guitarist Jack Mustaine. As he slowly pieces together the town's – and Vida's – secret, the pair become lovers, and the dream dawns in Vida of running far, far away with him and escaping the Good Gray Man ...

  Brite's foreword to this short novel tells us, helpfully, that unless we're from Louisiana we won't really "get" this tale; Lucius Shepard must be wondering who his friends are. Be that as it may, this Scottish reader felt he was "getting" it OK; the dialect is easy enough to follow after a few brief moments of splashing around in it, uncertain if one will sink or swim. And that's an apt metaphor, because the richness of the swirling prose Shepard manages to draw from the dialect does make the experience of reading this tale feel like a languorous swim in waters that are placid but, one is aware, deceptively so: powerful currents hide below.

  There are many moments of incidental sweetness here. The jukebox in the local bar, Le Bon Chance, contains records of past and future events. Nedra Hawes, the local psychic, seems at first a perfectly ordinary middle-aged woman, but makes no secrets about her pretty young black girlfriend, Arlise – who's one of the most winning characters in the book. Local Sicilian petty crime boss Joe Dill has an outrageously sexy Vietnamese concubine, Tuyet, who may or may not be a witch and, indeed, may or may not control Dill.

  Like all Golden Gryphon's output, this is a beautifully produced book, although Potter's interior illustrations, while nice enough, seem nothing special. The character portrayals are enjoyable, with Grail itself the most central character of all; and the story serves well. But what really holds one is the writing – this sea of words in which one swims.

  Louisiana Breakdown is a slight book, but a very engaging one.

  —Infinity Plus

  The Grail Conspiracy

  by Lynn Sholes and Joe Moore

  Midnight Ink, 343 pages, paperback, 2005

  The Da Vinci Code has a lot to answer for. For the past couple of years or more we've had floods of historical-conspiracy novels, rewriting-the-history-of-the-early-Christian-Church novels, Grail-hunting novels, secret-societies-that-seek-to-rule-the-world novels, and so on. Some of these – like The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason and even more so David Hewson's Lucifer's Shadow – are very good; most are better than The Da Vinci Code itself (not a difficult task); and a few are ... well ...

  The Grail Conspiracy falls into the central category: it's better than The Da Vinci Code, but that's about as much as one can say for it. It opens with the chance discovery, amid bloodshed, of the Holy Grail in an Iraqi desert by TV investigative journalist Cotten Stone. The implausibility in that sentence is obvious – no, not the bit about the Grail, the idea of an American TV news channel (Cotten works for "SNN") employing a fleet of investigative journalists.

  Cotten smuggles the artefact back home to the US in the hopes of the journalistic scoop of her life, and sure enough that's what comes her way after the goblet has been verified by various scientists and scholars, notably those in the employ of the Vatican. Indirectly linked to the Vatican is the academic and priest John Tyler who, despite being considerably older than Cotten and, like, you know, a priest, has a considerable allure so far as she's concerned – and (you've guessed this bit, haven't you?) the attraction's mutual.

  But, astonishingly, there are Bad Guys after the Grail as well, and murders start happening all around Cotten and John – at least one of them, a car bomb, intended to have Cotten herself as victim. Behind all this mayhem is, of course, a secret and ancient society made up of Very Rich and Influential Men who want the Grail in order to ... Yes, well, anyway, they want the Grail a lot and don't mind killing to get it. After all, they might be able to avert the imminent Apocalypse.

  There's nothing outrageously wrong with The Grail Conspiracy aside from the occasional clumsily written passage and the obvious two-dimensional nature of the characters, but at the same time there's nothing particularly right about it either. The action scenes are well handled, but there's the feeling about them of having bee
n here before. The plot displays a lack of originality: read a pile of other, similar books, put the best bits of their plots into a bowl, stir well, and – bingo! And the book itself seems to have low aspirations: it's as if it's not trying to be anything more than a routine "product".

  This is moderate entertainment which, if you're a devotee of historical-conspiracy novels, you can expect to enjoy, well, moderately. Other readers might prefer to look elsewhere.

  —Crescent Blues

  The Longest Way Home

  by Robert Silverberg

  Eos, 294 pages, hardback, 2002

  Long ago, life evolved on the planet now called Homeworld without any one of several intelligent species establishing overall dominance in the way humankind has on Earth. Possibly the brightest of the species is the one now called the Indigenes, who are very roughly humanoid and probably our equal in intelligence, but of such a different philosophical bent that no comparison would really be possible – their system of thinking sufficiently overlaps with ours for the species to communicate adequately, but full communication is fundamentally impossible.

  But then a first wave of colonists arrived from Earth. There was no real conquest, because of the lack of a single dominant species: the Folk, as the descendants of the first wave are now called, simply moved in and effectively became part of the ecosystem. A long while later came another colonial wave from Earth, and this time there was a war of conquest against the Folk; the descendants of the second wave are now called the Masters, and they rule the roost with the Folk as their serfs – in fact, as their slaves, although the Masters are in general benevolent overlords.

  Young Joseph, a Master from the south, is staying with family friends on an estate in the north when there is a widespread revolt of the Folk. He alone is spared from massacre on this particular estate, and he decides to quest as best he can the several thousand miles back to his homeland. En route he is assisted by various of the indigenous species – including, for purposes of their own, the Indigenes – as well as some of the Folk, the latter being ignorant of his status as a Master. He has divers adventures, including the loss of his virginity to a Folkish girl.

  Joseph gets home in the end, despite being captured by the Folkish army; they have an uneasy armistice with the Masters of the south, and so ship him the last distance.

  All of that is a fairly thin plot upon which to construct a novel, and this feeling of thinness is pervasive while reading the book – as if Silverberg, who has demonstrated countless times that he can be a masterful writer when he wants to be, were here working on autopilot. Joseph's adventures are not particularly exciting (although obviously they'd be pretty goddam exciting if you had to live them yourself), and many of his other experiences during the quest seem fairly pedestrian. One is left looking for flashes of Silverberg's conceptual genius for want of a continuous diet of it.

  And of those flashes there are a few. One delight is a moderately intelligent – it can talk – native lifeform called the noctambulo, which is possessed of two brains: one brain sleeps during the day and the other during the night, with the result that the daytime noctambulo is an entirely different person from the nighttime one. Joseph is befriended by the nighttime persona of one of these creatures, but with sunrise must struggle to be noticed at all by the other individual living in the same body.

  Another treasurable moment occurs when Joseph is treated by one of the Indigenes to an exposition of the Indigene theology. The Indigenes have no objections at all to the terrestrial colonists, because in their view these are but two waves, out of many, of godlings sent by the real gods to bring knowledge, albeit in a jumbled fashion, to the intelligent species of Homeworld. Each wave of godlings will stay a while, doing a lot of good things (as directed by the gods) and a lot of bad things (because godlings are pretty flawed emissaries), and then depart. It is tantalizingly implicit in the exposition that the two sets of colonists from Earth are by no means the first waves of "godlings" to have spent some time on Homeworld, although we are given no details of the earlier ones.

  But such flashes of delight make up only a small portion of a novel which otherwise, well, plods a bit. Overall, aside from a few elements of graphic sexuality, it reads like a well written but not especially inspiring young-adult novel from the era before writers (and more importantly publishers) of young-adult novels had cottoned on to the fact that the kids are every bit as sophisticated as readers as are their adult counterparts.

  The Longest Way Home can, then, be viewed as Silverberg Lite. As with Bud Lite, there's froth but not a whole lot of body.

  —Infinity Plus

  Way Station

  by Clifford D. Simak

  Gollancz, 189 pages, paperback, 2000; reissue of a book originally published in 1963

  There was a time between the early 1950s and the mid-1960s when every novel by Clifford Simak seemed to capture the true magic of science fiction, conveying often quite complicated ideas with an astonishing readability and flow, and displaying a delightful expertise in capturing mood and atmosphere – most often the mood and atmosphere of the American Midwest, which seemed to be Simak's natural territory.

  Time and Again (1951), City (1952; in fact a fixup of stories from the 1940s), Ring Around the Sun (1953), Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), They Walked Like Men (1962), Way Station (1963) and All Flesh is Grass (1965) – one by one they came, and one by one they delighted. And then, quite abruptly, he seemed to lose it. His novels from Why Call Them Back from Heaven? (1967) onwards are generally enjoyable enough (although progressively less so), yet give the impression of a writer content to tread water.

  Most of the novels of Simak's Golden Age are full of action and drama. In this context Way Station, often argued to be the greatest of them, is the odd one out. For approximately the first half of the book – perhaps more – the plot is virtually static, the concern being to set up and explore the situation in which the action of the later pages, such as it is, can take place. This of course sounds like a recipe for disaster – one is reminded of the writer manqué in George Gissing's New Grub Street (1891) who plans a novel about the owners of a corner shop who for three volumes do nothing but own their corner shop – and yet Way Station is compulsively readable for all its seeming lack of event. Because what Simak succeeds in doing is to give us a galaxy-spanning space opera all within the restricted confines of a lonely Wisconsin farmhouse.

  Enoch Wallace is the occupant of that farmhouse. He was of age to fight in the American Civil War, but soon thereafter, his folks having died, he was approached by a representative of the Galactic Council and asked if his home could be converted into a way station for matter-transmitted travellers through our spiral arm of the Milky Way. Agreeing, he received the gift of immortality, but at the same time had to accept the burden of eternal loneliness, for no human being may ever be permitted to share his secret. Until now, that is, when a covert US Government agency has become intrigued by this unaging eremite ...

  It might seem that the stage is being set for a tale of derring-do between the aliens and the snoops, but in fact the plot elements concerning the Government agency are really somewhat tangential, serving partly as a component of the tale's resolution and partly as a quasi-catalyst for the rest. More to the point are the political and religious shenanigans among the member species of the Galactic Council, and the way in which they reach out to affect and eventually focus on Wallace and his humble way station. Like Wallace, we do not directly experience these crises and their consequences until close to the end of the book: instead they are related to us by various of the visiting aliens, and we actually see only the tiny but crucial part of the whole that concerns Earth. In the process, however, we are treated to sketchy details of enough alien civilizations and biologies to spark off at least a couple of dozen other, more extrovert space operas.

  This is not a flawless work (in his rush towards the resolution, Simak indulges in some pulp plotting), but it is nevertheless a mightily impressiv
e one. Long after the plot itself has faded from the memory – this reviewer could remember nothing of it after thirty years – the situation delineated in the novel remains indelibly imprinted, as does the eloquent capturing of Wallace's solitude, which is not joyless, and of his timelessness of mind. In terms of human society he is an anonymous cypher living out a meaningless, monotonous life; in terms of the true reality he has a richer existence by far than any human before or since. And it will continue to become richer, and to enrich him, for all eternity, whatever the transient events of the world around. It is actually a disappointment to the reader that the novel's resolution – which in virtually any other tale would give us the typical sf adrenaline rush as horizons are suddenly hugely expanded for humanity – must inevitably lead to a disruption of this curiously idyllic status quo.

  Way Station, the most unusual space opera in all of sf's canon, is a book to treasure, and one to re-read rather more often, perhaps, than once every thirty years.

  —Infinity Plus

  Worlds Enough & Time: Five Tales of Speculative Fiction

  by Dan Simmons

  Eos, 262 pages, paperback, 2002

  Dan Simmons is such a fine writer that it's unthinkable that any collection of his stories would be anything less than okay. But, by the same token, one expects a Simmons collection to be a bit more than okay, and I'm not too sure this one is.